First Steps Consulting – Startup Strategy  

One of the most important assets of an aspiring entrepreneur is their network and the difference between a successful and unsuccessful startup can often be identified in their ability to leverage that network.  Unfortunately, as networks grow they also become increasingly difficult to properly manage.

An excellent article in the September edition of the Harvard Business Review titled “Death by Information Overload” tackles this subject, and is a worthwhile read, but what I wanted to highlight in this post is a resource I have been using in its beta form that tackles some of the challenges in managing networks and the communications that these networks generate.

The service is called Gist and I believe it addresses the following pain points for startup entrepreneurs.

1. Managed Priority: One of the key benefits of Gist is the ability to determine how “important” each of your contacts is on a scale of 1-100.  This priority rating can be used to filter what information you want to be shown first about your network, allowing you to keep tabs on the people or companies that matter most.  As  a startup entrepreneur, your time is so limited, that you need to focus on the relationships that matter, and Gist helps you do that.
2. Consolidation of Relevant Contact and Company Information: Once you have dialed in the priorities for your contacts, you will be fed any recent news, blog posts or tweets from this network, served up based on their level of importance.  This consolidation of information saves the harried startup entrepreneur hours of time researching key contacts, and may even alert them to critical news or information about their key contacts.
3. Contact Generation: Gist can collect contacts from a variety of sources, including LinkIn, GMail, Saleforce, Facebook, Twitter and any other CSV file that you can create.  For Outlook, Gist will scan your email and generate new contacts from the senders or recipients of email messages.
4. Inbox Organization: After Gist scans your Outlook account, it will organize attachments and communication history by contact, allowing you view historical activity for a given contact or company.

While Gist is not alone in the Inbox organization market, with Xobni being another application to watch, Gist is the first well thought out effort I have seen to aggregate news from multiple sources around key contacts, and even more importantly to allow you to prioritize by contact.

Gist is still in its beta phase as of Sept, 2009, and is free for the moment.  Give it a try and let me know what you think!